Getting a license must be so easy in Germany. I do remember being trained (and tested) here in UK on confined area assessment & approach, landing and take-off, and also on sloping ground landing / take off.
Bit OTT John. There are some important differences between UK and DE, not least of which being that PPLs cannot land off-airfield in DE without costly and time-consuming permissions. Confined areas is, of course, in the syllabus, but maybe it doesn't get the focus it might otherwise do if folk are likely to be landing off-field - as many PPLs in the UK do. As a point of comparision, German PPLs are more likely to have more practice in stuck pedal than their UK counterparts; a hangover from the pre-JAR syllabus and FIs teaching what they have been taught.
Then there are some accountability issues: UK has one national authority; Germany has a national authority for commercial pilots and activities, and umpteeen regional authorities for PPL licensing and local permissions. So when PPL decides to be a commercial pilot and crashes, who has juristiction?
This division in licensing also results in some daft stuff like PPLs being able to get permissions to do pleasure flights (off-field if you have the permissions...) and sell seats on those flights as long as they are not making more than their costs (which they shurley never do...).
It also results in situations like a commercial pilot landing a CAT B, performance class III helicopter on a hospital rooftop for the kiddies at Christmas, with permission. Until the national authority cited JAR-OPS and pulled rank (AOC holder, commercial pilot).
In my opinion incidents like this (these actually) seem to point more to a problem in standardisation and accountability.
TT